If I Survive You

By: Jonathan Escoffery

Narrated by: Torian Brackett

Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize
Longlisted for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award
Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction
A September 2022 IndieNext Pick

A major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family striving for more in Miami, and introduces a generational storyteller.

In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on first through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what their younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.”

Masterfully constructed with heart and humor, the linked stories in Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You center on Trelawny as he struggles to carve out a place for himself amid financial disaster, racism, and flat-out bad luck. After a fight with Topper-himself reckoning with his failures as a parent and his longing for Jamaica-Trelawny claws his way out of homelessness through a series of odd, often hilarious jobs. Meanwhile, his brother, Delano, attempts a disastrous cash grab to get his kids back, and his cousin, Cukie, looks for a father who doesn’t want to be found. As each character searches for a foothold, they never forget the profound danger of climbing without a safety net.

Pulsing with vibrant lyricism and inimitable style, sly commentary and contagious laughter, Escoffery’s debut unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and white supremacy. With If I Survive You, Escoffery announces himself as a prodigious storyteller in a class of his own, a chronicler of American life at its most gruesome and hopeful.

©2022 Jonathan Escoffery (P)2022 Penguin Random House Canada

Critic reviews

Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize
Shortlisted for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award
Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction
A September 2022 IndieNext Pick

“[Escoffery] is, throughout, a gifted, sure-footed storyteller, with a command of evocative language and perfectly chosen details . . . Perhaps most important, he wields a disarming, irreverent sense of humor . . . [If I Survive You] makes me eager to read him for a long time to come.” ―Andrew Martin, The New York Times Book Review

“Not since Moby Dick has the all-American ethos of 'sink or swim' on your own been dramatized to such devastating effect. If I Survive You is an extraordinary debut collection, an intensively granular, yet panoramic depiction of what it's like to try to make it ― or not ― in this kaleidoscopic madhouse of a country.” ―Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air

A True Tale

If I survive You

Though this book is a work of fiction, it is the truest book I have listened to in a long time. If you are a human you will be carried away by this common story from a unique perspective. If you are a mixed race Jamaican male living in America, the author is almost clairvoyant in describing your experience.

A special shout out to the reader who has the rare ability to speak clear American English as well as authentic Jamaican patois.

Listen to this book. I promise you will not hear another like it.